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E.T. OR NOT E.T.? THAT IS the QUESTION. by Richard M. Blaber

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E.T. OR NOT E.T.? THAT IS the QUESTION. by Richard M. Blaber E.T. OR NOT E.T.? THAT IS THE QUESTION. By Richard M. Blaber. Abstract: Attempts to detect electromagnetic signals from extraterrestrial intelligences have hitherto proved fruitless, and no plausible solution has been provided for the ‘Fermi Paradox’ that does not entail the non-existence of radio broadcasting and interstellar travelling exoplanetary civilisations. Yet life itself, and even intelligent life, of a non- technological kind, may be abundant. Keywords: extraterrestrial intelligence; astrobiology. Section 1: Introduction. In 1961, the American radio-astronomer, Frank Drake, organised a meeting at the radio-telescope at Green Bank, West Virginia, then the headquarters of the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory, as a follow-up to Project Ozma (1960; see Drake, 1961a), which had tried, without success, to detect radio signals emanating from putative intelligent inhabitants of planets orbiting the stars Epsilon Eridani (K2V) and Tau Ceti (G8V), 10.5 and ~12 light years away respectively. Cocconi and Morrison (1959) had proposed that efforts should be made to search for such signals, focussing on the 21 cm wavelength, ~1.4276 GHz frequency band, associated with interstellar hydrogen. His preparations for the meeting led him to produce the now- famous (or notorious, depending on one’s perspective) Drake Equation (Drake, 1961b). 푁 = 푅∗푓푝푁푒푓푙푓푖푓푐퐿 . (1) Here, N is the number of civilisations in the Milky Way Galaxy whose electromagnetic emissions are detectable; R* is the average rate 1 of star formation per year in our Galaxy; fp is the fraction of those stars with planets; Ne the average number of those planets that may develop an ecosystem; fl the fraction of those planets that succeed in developing life; fi the fraction of these that develop intelligent life; fc the fraction of these that develop interstellar communication; and finally, L, the average length of time such civilisations survive and continue to send interstellar communications (SETI Institute, 2020). The first comment to be made on the equation is that Ne is redundant; clearly, a planet that failed to develop life would not, per definitionem, have an ecosystem. We will have more to say about the equation later. Section 2: Life, ‘Intelligent’ Life, and Techno-Life. Bar-On, Phillips and Milo (2018) point out that the human population of this planet (7.7 billion in mid-20191; 7.785 billion as of 18th May, 20202) is only a small fraction of its total biomass. Plants, fungi, bacteria, archaea, protists and viruses together account for 543.2 Gt C (Gigatonnes of carbon) out of a total of 550 Gt C, or 98.7636%. Animals, they say, constitute 2 Gt C, or 0.3636%, of which arthropods constitute 1 Gt C, fish 0.7, molluscs 0.2, livestock 0.04 and humans 0.06 Gt C (livestock figure corrected). Their animal biomass figure must be an under-estimate, on the basis of their own calculations, as 100 – 98.7636 = 1.2364%, and 1.2364% of 550 Gt C is 6.8002 Gt C. Mayr (1992, 1995) argues that the existence of extraterrestrial life is by no means the same as that of extraterrestrial intelligent life. He points out, as Bar-on, Phillips and Milo (op. cit.) do, the preponderance of non-intelligent life on this planet. The argument – put forward by Carl Sagan, among others (Sagan and Drake, 1997) – that: ‘Since intelligence and technology have a high survival value it seems likely that primitive life forms on the planets of other stars, evolving over many billions of years, would 1 https://population.un.org/wpp/Publications/Files/WPP2019_Highlights.pdf. 2 https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/. 2 occasionally develop intelligence, civilization and a high technology’ is completely false. Advanced technology does not have a ‘high survival value’ – indeed, it may very well have the opposite, as the effects of anthropogenic climate change, resource depletion, biodiversity loss and over-population may eventually prove. Sagan and Drake’s linkage of intelligence and technology – of the advanced, industrial kind – is also false. Mayr (op. cit.) is correct to point out that intelligence per se has no such survival value – plants, bacteria and archaea are perfectly well able to survive and thrive without a single atom of intelligence between any of them, and we ‘intelligent’ humans – along with the rest of the animal kingdom – would be in a very bad way indeed without the plants! But let the reader imagine an extraterrestrial civilisation without advanced technology, but with plentiful intelligence. Such a civilisation could have a Stonehenge; it could have its equivalent of the Pyramids, the Parthenon, and the Sistine Chapel. It might have produced its own version of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Mozart, Monet and Van Gogh. Yet because it did not produce radio signals detectable by the SETI Institute, it would not count. Section 3: They Must Be Humanoid, Mustn’t They? Those of us who are aficionados of television science fiction programmes have grown accustomed to laughing at the assumption in Star Trek and other such shows that the aliens will all be humanoid – that they will all share the same basic body shape as ourselves, with a trunk, four limbs, and a head. Lineweaver (2008), in demonstrating that human-like intelligence is not a ‘convergent feature’ of evolution, also proves the fallacy of this idea: for not only is there no reason to suppose that humanoid intelligence is likely to result from convergent evolution, but neither is there any reason to suppose that human body shape (which evolved from that of Pliocene primates ancestral to the human precursor Australopithecus afarensis, such as Ardipithecus ramidus, also ancestral to the chimpanzees, see White, et al, 2009), will do so. 3 The point is not facetious, and a mere matter of laughing at the follies of film or television science fiction script-writers. The brain of an adult bottlenose dolphin, Tursiops truncatus, and that of an adult human, are roughly comparable in mass: 1.5-1.6 kg, compared with 1.3-1.4 kg3. Its encephalisation quotient (EQ) is 4.14, compared to the human 7.0, and its brain-body mass ratio, given a brain mass of 1.5 kg and a body mass of 120 kg, is 1.25%, compared to that of a human (brain mass 1.4 kg, body mass 75 kg) of 1.86% (Marino, 2004; Cairó, 2011). We have, in cetaceans, an example of non-human intelligence. Dolphins, whales and porpoises have not, and will never, paint an equivalent of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, or write their version of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov; nor will they ever discover Euler’s Identity – but they are still intelligent, whatever that slippery word means. Orbiting some other star in our Galaxy, or one of the Magellanic Clouds or the Andromeda Galaxy, there may well be a planet harbouring a mammal-like marine species, or even a whole family of genera of species, of aquatic intelligences like the cetaceans; but the SETI Institute will never hear from them, either. Section 4: The ‘Freak Accident’ of Life? Davies (2011) points out that there was a debate between biologists and biochemists who believed that life on Earth, or anywhere else it might have arisen in the universe, was a ‘freak accident’, and those who regarded it as a ‘cosmic imperative’, listing Monod (1972) representing the former camp, and de Duve (1995) the latter. The Miller (1953) and Miller-Urey (Miller and Urey, 1959) experiments demonstrated that it was possible to produce amino acids from a reducing atmosphere similar to one thought to be like that of the primitive Earth (methane, water vapour, ammonia and molecular hydrogen), and similar to that of Saturn’s moon, Titan, although very much warmer. (Titan’s lower atmosphere consists of 94.2% nitrogen, 5.65% methane and 0.099% hydrogen; Catling and Kasting, 2017). 3 See: http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/facts.html. 4 Amino acids, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and other ‘organic’ chemicals (the nomenclature is confusing here, because the word ‘organic’, in this instance, does not signify of organic origin – ‘carbon chemicals’ and ‘carbon chemistry’ would be better terms) have been found present in meteoritic material, most notoriously, perhaps, given the claims made about it in 1995, concerning the alleged presence in it of ‘microfossils’, in the Martian meteorite discovered in Antarctica on 27th December 1984, Allen Hills 84001 (ALH84001); (Botta and Bada, 2002; Halevy, Fischer and Eiler, 2011; Koike, et al, 2020). However, carbon compounds – even an abundance of carbon compounds – do not add up to life. They are rather like a great heap of children’s Lego bricks, awaiting the children needed to come and assemble them into whatever their imaginations create with them. Life is not carbon compounds, but a unity made from them, and furthermore, it is a dynamic and purposive unity. That, in fact, is the essence of life. So the choice is not a false dichotomy between ‘freak accident’ and ‘cosmic imperative’. There was and is no such imperative. Carter (1974) was right to insist on the ‘weak’ anthropic principle, in that our position as observers in the universe is privileged in time (and therefore in space); but the ‘strong’ anthropic principle (Davies, 1982, pp.120-122), that our universe is such that observers must evolve within it, has no merit. That they have done so is a fact; but to move from have to must, in this case, is a petitio principii. There is no intrinsic reason why, given the laws and constants of physics as they are, and the initial physical conditions of the universe as they were, that intelligent life, qualifying for ‘observer status’, would eventually evolve within it.
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